Many workplaces require employees to wear safety glasses at the workplace. This requirement is generally a matter of worker safety but is also usually required by state and federal law. Workers who need corrective lenses have a choice of wearing prescription safety eyewear or wearing bulky, usually uncomfortable, safety goggles over their regular prescription eyewear. Many workers who need corrective lenses prefer to wear prescription safety eyewear for reasons of at least comfort and appearance. Accordingly, there is a need for prescription safety eyewear for use in the workplace.
Many employers, therefore, provide prescription safety eyewear as an employment benefit, paying for some or all of the cost of such eyewear. Conventionally, however, employees have to obtain their own prescription eyewear and submit the cost for reimbursement, which is inconvenient for both the employer and the employee. For example, administrative difficulties arise for the employer in tracking eligibility for benefits. Employees might resent having to spend personal time obtaining company-required equipment. One alternative is to have employees order from a catalog, which presents problems as to fit of the eyewear on the employee. Another alternative is to have an eyewear seller come to the place of employment for selection and fitting of prescription safety eyewear, which does not work well for employees who, for example, are assigned to a late shift or who are absent from the plant on vacation or on business on the day the seller is present at the place of employment.
In fitting apparel to be worn by persons performing work in potentially hazardous settings, such as a factory, plant, or construction site, it is important to have the ability to conveniently measure the dimensions of the workers' body parts on which the apparel is to be worn. The traditional process of fitting employees with personal protective equipment (PPE) is inefficient and cumbersome. An employee must first interact with a human resources personnel, safety specialists and/or outside vendors to ascertain the required PPE and options for selecting the individual apparel components. For example, a particular factory may require a specific type of safety glasses and/or hard-toed shoes.
In the traditional process, once the employer specifies the required complement of PPE, the employee normally has choices regarding the particular design aspects of the individual components. In the case of hard-toed protective shoes, for example, an employee would normally select their size, color and style. One way for an employee to be outfitted with PPE is to visit a company or commercial store to be measured and then make selections. Another method some companies employ is to direct their employees to websites offering selections once the appropriate dimensional measurements of the employee have been taken.
Recently, manufacturing facilities and construction sites have used systems that employ a conventional digital camera to ascertain the dimensional measurements of an employee. Since those conventional systems only employ a single camera, a template with known indicia of distances must be placed on or near the human subject during the measurement process. In this way, the dimensional measurements of the human subject's body parts on which the PPE is to be worn can be accurately derived. It would be beneficial if such a template was not needed, as it is often inconvenient to use in the work place.